'In a Day's Work' Gives a Voice to the #MeToos in the Margins

In her new book, Bernice Yeung amplifies the plights of working-class, immigrant women.

By
Melissa Hung

Mar 20, 2018

Getty ImagesERIC FEFERBERG

Last fall the #MeToo movement spread on social media, propelling sexual harassment into a national conversation. But long before the hashtag went viral and famous actresses went public with allegations of assault, journalist Bernice Yeung investigated the sexual abuse of some of America’s most vulnerable and overlooked women.

Since 2012, Yeung has written about brutal assaults on the immigrant women who pick our produce and clean our offices. Most of them are Latina; some are undocumented. Yeung, a reporter at The Center for Investigative Reporting, worked alongside collaborators from other media outlets to expose the widespread sexual harassment and abuse of women workers in the multi-platform projects "Rape in the Fields" and "Rape on the Night Shift." Each project took more than a year to report and produce, and fueled her desire to bring even more of these stories into the light.

The New Press

"In a Day's Work," out today from The New Press, is the result of that passion. Yeung’s debut tells the stories of immigrant women who came to America to escape poverty only to face sexual violence. Taken advantage of by employers and supervisors who threaten their lives and livelihoods, the women courageously speak up, organize, and fight back.

While I’ve known Yeung for more than 20 years, her dedication to making sure immigrant women’s voices are heard never ceases to amaze me. I was thrilled to speak with Yeung about the invisibility of working-class women and how growing up in an immigrant family led her to journalism.

Melissa Hung: How did you get into pursuing this story? Was this something that was on your radar already?

Bernice Yeung: Well, I can say that violence against immigrant women was on my radar from my SF Weekly days. In the early 2000s, I did a story about a woman, an Indian immigrant, who was here because of her husband who was working in Silicon Valley on an H-1B visa. Her immigration status was tethered to his. And so, when he was abusive to her, she found herself in a situation where she couldn’t very easily leave or find assistance. She basically had no standing in [America] without her husband. That kind of predicament — around something as clear as needing to get away from violence in your life and being prohibited by immigration status — always stuck with me.

MH: You’ve been working on the topic of sexual harassment for years. Now, coincidentally, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are happening. What’s it like for you to see this happening with high-profile people when you've been trying to uncover this topic for years about women in the margins?

BY: When it first started happening, the reaction of most people who care about these issues is that it’s amazing that so many women are coming forward in such a bold way to break some of the taboo around speaking up about sexual harassment and sexual assault. And so there was just this amazement and awe that it was happening at all. And then also amazement and awe that when these women were coming forward, they were largely believed. The accused harassers were actually dealing with consequences. That was just so different from the experience of many of the workers that we had covered over the years, where they felt that they hadn't been heard, they hadn't been believed, and that their employers — and sometimes law enforcement — didn't take their complaints seriously. I called up janitors and farm workers that we had covered in the past and asked them how they felt about #MeToo. They were extremely proud and excited that this was becoming an issue that was so prominent. But they also felt a bit indignant that they had been trying to say, "enough is enough" for a long time but their stories hadn't been as visible.

I think as time has passed, a lot of credit has to be given to #TimesUp and #MeToo. There is this keen interest in being more inclusive of all women workers and this desire to use fame and access to media to not only highlight the fact that this problem exists, but the fact that this problem exists for women in the margins, women in low-wage work, immigrant women. What I hope to see next is a reckoning around prevention. I'd like to think that the ultimate goal is to make sure it doesn't happen in the first place.

MH: There were a lot of women that you couldn’t include in your reporting because they felt that sharing their stories would add to their problems. And then, few of these cases even get prosecuted. Why is that and what needs to change?

I'd like to think that the ultimate goal is to make sure assault doesn't happen in the first place.

BY: I think this is the fundamental question. At the top level, workers need an assurance that if they're going to come forward with a complaint that it will be confidential and anonymous, and that there won't be retaliation. The number one concern — from people I've spoken to for this book and also some of the reporting I'm doing now — is losing their jobs or being blackballed from the industry, which is not at all dissimilar to what we've heard from women in Hollywood and the media and politics. It's amazingly similar. It's wanting to preserve their financial livelihood.

When it comes to criminal prosecutions — that's actually an area that I'm exploring now in my current reporting. Why do these cases not make it very far in the criminal justice system? I don't have an answer yet, but hopefully in a year I will. I think it has something to do with the way in which these cases are investigated. There's a lot that’s deep-seated about women's credibility that goes back decades, if not centuries. The default for too long has been that she's not to be believed. I think that's pretty entrenched in our society and in our legal system.

MH: One thing that struck me was how these women were purposefully made invisible in their jobs. Why are janitors working late at night, which puts them at greater risk? What’s the big deal with someone taking out my trash in the middle of the day?

BY: We asked our building to change the hours of the janitors after we did this project because it seemed like such an obvious, easy thing to do. Workers have told us they prefer it because they can spend more time with their families, and it reduces the risk of isolation that can lead to extreme sexual harassment. There's this perception that we don’t want to see the people doing the labor around us, that somehow that would be off-putting. I don't totally understand the logic of that, but it has been the tradition, I guess, for a long time now, and a lot of companies operate that way. But I think there are some ways to shift the hours. When you start to get to know your janitor, when you get to know the other people working in your building, you develop relationships with them that are friendly. And there's just more eyes, so there's less risk and more protection.

There's this perception that we don’t want to see the people doing the labor around us.

One of the janitors that we met in Minnesota, we went with her to work one morning. She worked one of these early morning shifts at a mall. We were there with cameras and recording equipment. As it got later in the morning, around almost 10 o'clock, people were preparing the department store to open. Some of her coworkers — the people who were selling watches or makeup — saw us with the cameras and they said, "Oh my gosh, what's going on here? Is this some big fashion event that we're having here later today?" And we said, "No, we're here to do a film about Leticia, the janitor." And everybody that we said that to, said, "Who? Where?" And she literally was standing no less than 25 feet away cleaning a mirror and nobody had ever noticed her. So I think there's also just something about low-wage work, where we just aren't paying attention.

MH: What is it like to cover sexual assault as your reporting beat? It seems difficult to think about this all the time.

BY: The fact that this happens still really pisses me off. I'm still really outraged by it. And so for reporting, especially investigative reporting, having that sense of urgency or fire is really helpful in digging into these stories. The other thing — this is very true for putting this book together — is that I am endlessly amazed and inspired by many of the women that I've met in the process of doing the reporting. Such incredibly difficult things have happened to them — and not to diminish or minimize all that they had to experience and all the work that they have done and are still doing to get to a better place — but they still continue on. They get up every day. They take care of their kids. They go to work. They just soldier on in this way that is amazing. So I don't get stuck in the really upsetting details of the violence, even though I think it's important for us to look it in the eye. I'm thinking of the full arc of many of these women’s stories, which is they experienced this horrific thing and they somehow found a resilience and they continue on.

MH: You’ve done a lot of work in journalism, from serving on the board of the Society for Professional Journalists to co-founding Hyphen and of course, all the investigative work you've done. What is it that keeps you going?

BY: I ask myself that all the time, to be honest.

MH: It's almost a question of: Why journalism?

I guess that's what the motivation is: trying to find a way to humanize people to other people.

BY: You would probably understand this better than most people I know — which is that there's something about growing up as a kid from an immigrant family who is aware of your outsider status, and feeling that who you are is not represented in the media or in people's understanding of you and your community. Media — journalism — is a way to bring these stories to the fore and to show people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to meet someone like me or somebody that I might write about. Not that it’s perfect — this is my interpretation of these individuals filtered through my lens and my bias and so on. I guess that's what the motivation is: trying to find a way to humanize people to other people. It's a humanizing project, even though I don't think we often think of journalism as such. How else do we get to know people who are different from us? We don't often live in communities that are hugely diverse, economically, racially, religious background-wise. So sometimes it's about meeting people in a movie or on a TV show. And at least through journalism, I feel like we can meet real people who are going through some real quandaries, questions, and challenges.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Melissa Hung is a writer and journalist. Her essays and reported stories have appeared in NPR, Vogue, and Catapult. Find her on Twitter.

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